DESCRIPTION: The purpose of this symposium is to present current work in the broad field of neural regeneration, which highlights recent progress. The symposium is planned for December 3-7, 1997 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California. This is a request for funding for the seventh in a series of alternate year conferences. Past symposia have been funded by the Paralyzed Veterans of America, the American Paralysis Association and the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association and NIH. Proposals for partial support from these same organizations have been submitted for the 1997 meeting. The Office of Regeneration Research Programs Advisory Board proposed the program which features one key note speaker (Martin Raff), two featured speakers (Fred Gage and Graham Creasey) and 36 other participants as speakers or chairpeople. Of these speakers and chairpeople, 5 are women. The topics for the sessions are as follows: 1) cortical plasticity in human subjects, 2) rewiring the injured CNS, 3) intrinsic neuronal limits to regeneration, 4) positive and negative genetic regulation of normal and pathological neuronal death, 5) mechanisms for establishing specificity of connections, and 6) specification of cellular identity and cell-cell signaling in development. There will be free communication from posters submitted by registrants and the meeting is open to anyone who registers. Student attendance is encouraged and supported. The meeting is advertised by the Regeneration Research Newsletter (circulation of 4500), Soc. for Neuroscience and IBRO newsletters and in TINS and at least one clinical journal. The advertisements encourage the attendance of women and minorities and in the case of student's receiving support from the 1995 meeting 14 of the 25 recipients were women and 7 were racial/ethnic minorities. The content of the symposium is published in the same Newsletter and will be submitted as abstracts to either J. Neurotrauma or Exp. Neurology and will be made available on the internet. Number of registrants is estimated at 250.